Global Innovation Design (GID) is a new joint Master's programme between the Royal College of Art and Imperial College London. It is a unique, transnational Master’s design initiative that brings together three major centres of design, culture, enterprise and industry: Europe, North America and Asia. The programme is a world-class design collaboration between four internationally renowned academic institutions. Each partner brings distinct expertise and complementary approaches to design, engineering, technology and business with an emphasis on internationally oriented design and innovation. GID offers a new global style of learning and unique educational and cultural experiences designed to meet the changing needs of enterprise in the twenty-first century. GID Master's students on the joint RCA/Imperial College programme study in New York and Tokyo during their first year and then in London for their graduation year. Graduates from the programme are expected to be central to innovation leadership in the twenty-first century. The programme is full time and runs over a period of two calendar years.... [-]

MA in Animation

The Animation programme is a world leader in practice and research, with a commitment to broadening the understanding of our discipline. We offer a unique learning and teaching environment, developing the creativity and skills required in an age of rapid cultural and technological change to enable students to contribute to this expanding and maturing field of moving image. Through innovative, practical research and an understanding of different contexts, traditions and histories, students learn through a potent combination of workshops, lectures, tutorials and, most importantly, through their own practice.

The emphasis of the Animation programme is the development of auteur–artist–filmmakers with a relationship to the industry. Our programme is very much about practising animation within a visually sophisticated, innovative and multi-disciplinary art and design context, which includes and demands developing skills and expertise.... [-]

MA in Architecture

Our missions in Architecture are to take a broad view and make the most of the RCA’s art and design context. At MA level we prepare students for an effective, ideas-driven approach to architecture. London is always our testing ground. We are both inspired by, and apply our ideas to, the city – combining experiment with plausibility. We tune in to its social, economic and cultural wavelength, prise open real lives and load our proposals with narrative and personality.

We are not interested in designing spaces that simply evolve the norms of style but work in a dynamic way with what happens in them. Our medium is not so much bricks and mortar but space itself; we consider the work of the architect as spanning between the hard materiality of building and the reprogramming of existing space. The pursuit of these aims in architecture makes particular sense in the broader context of the College, where the proximity of sophisticated practice across the art and design spectrum underpins a multidisciplinary view of design.... [-]

MA in Ceramic & Glass

The programme exists to encourage skilled practice and creative thinking in the two media of ceramics and glass. We feel that there are interests and outcomes common to both, and students are encouraged to experiment across a range of material possibilities.

The Ceramics & Glass programme is a world leader in research and practice. However we do not see ceramics and glass merely as  a fixed set of media. We prize and celebrate diversity and breadth. We embrace connections.

Our programme is a site for discursive practice, where cultural, social, personal, historical and aesthetic concerns intersect. We believe that the skills of making and thinking can develop in tandem, and that the made object is a vehicle for expression that can engage with the individual and society.... [-]

MA in Critical & Historical Studies

The purpose of the CHS programme is to encourage debate, understanding, intellectual confidence and self-expression in the history, philosophy and criticism of the various disciplines taught at the College. It is designed to enhance each student’s experience at the College by engaging with important ideas that are relevant to their studio work in an exciting and challenging manner. The programme provides each student with an intellectual framework within which they can begin to establish a coherent relationship between theory and practice. The CHS programme is supported by RCADE, the RCA’s Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).... [-]

MA in Critical Writing in Art & Design

Launched in October 2010, the Critical Writing in Art & Design programme is an exciting new development at the RCA. We offer MA and research students an opportunity to explore new ways of writing about contemporary art and design at a time when the media is undergoing considerable change. The programme has been built on the idea that writing and criticism are creative practices in their own right, with their own techniques, ethics and technologies. Taught by leading critics, editors and writers and working alongside artists and designers in the studio-based courses at the RCA, students will graduate with the skills and knowledge required to pursue successful careers in the arts.... [-]

MA in Curating Contemporary Art

The Curating Contemporary Art programme is a leader in its field, with an explicitly global perspective on the current role of the curator. Established in 1992, the MA Curating Contemporary Art is the only curatorial course to place the key issues posed by globalisation at the heart of its curriculum. It is also unique in operating on a studio model. It approaches the field critically, theoretically and through best-practice in commissioning, exhibition-making, programming and art writing in museums, galleries and a broad range of alternative contexts. Widely acknowledged as an important marker of current developments in contemporary art, the annual CCA show in the RCA galleries has become known for experimental approaches to working with artists, and for introducing new international artists to UK audiences. In 2011 the graduation show Shadowboxing included works by artists Mariana Castillo Deball, Sean Dockray, Marysia Lewandowska and Wendelien van Oldenborgh, produced in dialogue with the curators as an experiment in collaborative research and production around the question 'What is an Apparatus?', which was taken from the essay of the same name by Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.... [-]

MA in Design Interactions

The Design Interactions programme explores new roles, contexts and approaches for interaction design in relation to the social, cultural and ethical impact of existing and emerging technologies.

Projects, which are often speculative and critical, aim to inspire debate about the human consequences of different technological futures – both positive and negative. Students work closely with people outside the College, designing for the complex, troubled people we are, rather than the easily satisfied consumers and users we are supposed to be. Project outcomes are expressed through a variety of media including prototypes, performance, video and photography.... [-]

MA in Design Products

The Design Products programme recognises that design is an activity that fundamentally shapes our world and influences the processes of change. We aim for our students to find their own place, from where they can lead or contribute to these processes.

Although there is a focus on product and furniture design, we do not see any limitations to our field; understanding very well that most of tomorrow’s products and services do not yet exist today. The nature of the course is pluralistic; we encourage diversity in thinking, opinions and ideologies. There are no preferred methods or styles. Our aim is for our students to develop their own voices.... [-]

MA in Fashion Menswear

Recognised for producing the most celebrated young menswear designers to launch onto the fashion scene in recent years, the RCA Menswear programme encourages a fearless approach to creative expression, fanatical technique and an informed professionalism. The realisation of individuality within a global design context is enabled through our excellent links with practising designers, international fashion brands and a dedicated staff team.

The programme evolves constantly to provide a learning environment that is supportive, challenging and relevant to the needs of its students and the fashion industry. In this way MA, MPhil and PhD students generate original and contextualised ideas, technique and material. Personal and sponsored projects, technical workshops, a professional practice programme, seminars, international visits and guest speakers from the design and related industries form the core curriculum.... [-]

MA in Fashion Womenswear

The programme pursues regeneration and development by constantly adapting to the realities and needs of the designers of the future. We see this as a positive challenge and an inspiration to all the work we undertake. New ideas, materials, methods and design applications are continually originated and progressed by our MA, MPhil and PhD students. Fashion Womenswear staff endeavour to create a course environment directed towards creative self-discovery, one that offers each student both the conceptual tutelage and technical guidance to achieve their three-dimensional design objectives.

The primary aim of the Womenswear programme is to unleash each student’s professional self-assurance through the acquisition of a sound design methodology and rigorous research technique, firmly underpinned by an in-depth understanding of the student’s chosen area of technical expertise. The programme is focused towards strengthening the students’ spirit of exploration through unique technical expertise and sound industry awareness. We encourage a strong work ethic across a broad variety of personally driven and industry-oriented design projects.... [-]

MA in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery

MA in Goldsmithing, Silversmithing, Metalwork & Jewellery's attitude has shifted from a purely object-centred focus to a wider scope, questioning and exploring issues centred on the human condition. We are responsive to the rapidly changing social and cultural landscape, and draw on history and technology in nurturing intellectual and creative skills directed at understanding and pushing forward jewellery and objects of human making. The rich and extensive bodies of knowledge associated with object-making and jewellery underpin an approach that is outward-looking, open to the wider discourse on commodity objects, connecting to contemporary life.... [-]

MA in History of Design

The RCA/V&A History of Design programme is internationally recognised as the leading centre for the postgraduate study of the history of design. We offer the opportunity to study design and material culture in all its aspects, from the early fifteenth century to the present day, across global geographies.

Our two-year, full-time MA programme is shared by two world-class centres of scholarship and creative excellence, the RCA and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). We provide a unique environment for the study of the aesthetic, social, cultural, technological, economic and political contexts for design through themes such as skill and craftsmanship, trade and exchange, marketing and consumption, style and identity.... [-]

MA in Information Experience Design

The way we construct, access and interpret information is changing beyond recognition from real-world wayfinding to the augmented environments and the navigation of digital systems. A thorough understanding of the new landscape has never been more essential. A designer’s audience now receives information and brand communication through multiple touchpoints (sometimes simultaneously). How we experience the world around us, inform ourselves, make choices and navigate unchartered territories is increasingly about the use and experience of multi-platform information delivery systems. The new communications designer must be able to create and curate these ‘experiences’.... [-]

MA in Innovation Design Engineering

The Innovation Design Engineering (IDE) programme is a leading-edge, creative product development course that involves experimentation, design, engineering and enterprise activities. In multidisciplinary teams or as individuals, participants work at the centre of complex, demanding projects with an emphasis on prototyping and proving propositions. The programme requires that a wide range of design skills and thinking are utilised (industrial design techniques, manufacturing, mechanical engineering, design research, user-centred design and sustainability, among others). It is external facing and encourages all to tackle important real-world issues involving advanced technical, design and social parameters. We believe that design is a verb not a noun.... [-]

MA in Interior Design

The RCA Architecture School is expanding parallel disciplines to address the realm of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ design, from the design of a window to the design of a city. The global ecological need to increase urban density, reduce waste and carbon emissions means that the re-use and adaptation of existing buildings will be a growth area in the international construction industry.

The new MA in Interior Design is offered not as an interior decoration course, but as an opportunity for graduates to extend their thinking on ‘altering architecture’*, i.e. that interior design is the site of spatial and physical intervention within existing buildings.... [-]

MA in Painting

Paint is a fluid material, and ideas surrounding what painting is, has been and could be are fluid and continually changing. With each new year group the dynamic of the studios and the conversations around painting shift and broaden in their agendas and processes. A walk through the building here in Battersea is a journey through all the possibilities of thinking and making, artists working through fleeting successes, hideous but essential wrong moves and hard-won moments of elation.

The Painting programme is a world leader in research and practice, with a commitment to broadening the understanding of our discipline in all its forms. Through the many learning and teaching experiences we offer, our students and staff rigorously, critically and supportively engage in personal tutorials, group seminars and presentations. These discussions and critiques take place physically in the Painting studios, across the College, in galleries and other partner institutions, and during visits to major exhibitions both in this country and abroad. On graduation a selection of our students are awarded studio residences, which the College supports through our mentoring scheme.... [-]

MA in Photography

Photography plays a crucial role in contemporary art, and the Photography programme at the RCA aims to provide a critical and educational environment in which students can develop as artists with photography at the core of their practice. We have a fluid approach to image making. Whether still or moving, analogue or digital, the photographic image is for us a visual form that aims to be thoughtful as well as playful: an allegorical and thoroughly visual form.

The programme understands photography as a medium with no fixed identity. This disregard for a fixed essence is photography’s strength: no aesthetic purity but a multiplicity of rhetorical forms used for the creation of fact, fiction and fantasy. Equally the boundary between the still and the moving image is now fluid and porous, enabling new forms of image making to be created.... [-]

MA in Printmaking

The Printmaking programme prides itself on the diversity of its student intake and its commitment to supporting each student in the search for a visual language appropriate to their interests and desires. The uniqueness of the RCA printmaking course is that it provides inductions in all print processes, and the support of skilled specialist technical instructors alongside a critical discourse fostered by a diverse team of practising artists. This creates an environment where definitions of print are challenged and expanded and results in a particular kind of hybridity in student work, which is distinguished from photography by the strong presence of drawing and from painting by the ever-presence of technology. The drawn and photographic image, use of text, bookworks and archiving practises are strong elements in the programme.... [-]

MA in Sculpture

Sculpture is a spatial art, intensely practical, yet essentially philosophical. It has always been closely associated with architecture and public space, with ritual and the ceremonial. It is a private art that is often over-publicised.

Sculpture at the RCA has been a longstanding programme, and one component of the Fine Art faculty. However our staff and students understand that there is a wider fine art intelligence that falls outside the faculty structure. The debates around painting, often via drawing, and the raw side of printing are closely associated in the minds of good students. The arts of photography, filmmaking, sound and performance, if not quite as much as dance, theatre, the sciences, engineering and urbanism, are habitual reference points.... [-]

MA in Service Design

The new Service Design programme will benefit from interaction with the other RCA design disciplines as well as its proximity to Imperial College London. The design of service experiences involves the design of the spaces and places in which services are delivered. It involves communications design, product design, interaction design and the exploitation of digital technologies that support those services. The design of TfL’s Barclays Cycle Hire Scheme and the Oyster Card are examples of this, and there are many other examples in the private and public sector including healthcare, hospitality, telecommunications and media sectors.

All of these demand an integrated approach to the design of service experiences and systems involving the integration of multiple design disciplines in a systems-based solution. They also require an implicit understanding of the technological, commercial and organisational context in the conception and execution of innovative services.... [-]

MA in Textiles

The programme aims to provide students with a course and an environment that encourage individuality, enhance their skills, and invite them to challenge and be challenged by related issues whilst exploring the breadth and diversity of textiles. The demands of the curriculum require passion and commitment and a strong sense of personal responsibility for the students’ own learning and development.

By experimenting, students develop their personal expression and identity in their work. Constantly evolving technology, innovation, art, design and traditional craft skills co-habit and fuse in the subject of textiles, creating the need for a full and intensive two-year programme. Collaborative work is strongly encouraged across the College and students are positively influenced by the melting pot of the RCA culture.... [-]

MA in Vehicle Design

The aim of the Vehicle Design programme at the RCA is to educate future generations of vehicle designers and make them aware of the changing social, cultural, commercial and technical context of mobility.

Through its original teaching timetable, expert staff team and collaboration with industry and users, the programme educates vehicle designers to be strategic and visionary. The programme is exceptional in that it bridges traditional vehicle design as an exercise in styling with a user and issues-based approach.

Automotivation is the philosophy of the programme. It takes vehicle design in new directions that encourage creative excellence through exploration, innovation and research. It seeks to reposition the practice of the discipline at the forefront of the debate about movement of goods and people. Students are expected to develop an awareness of the range of issues that affect vehicle design, including legislation, production, safety, technology, materials, aerodynamics, ergonomics and environmental impact, as well as key aesthetic principles.... [-]

MA in Visual Communication

In this unprecedented time of major change and new challenges in the world of Visual Communication, we have been thrown into the centre of an exciting vortex and have to grab the immense potential at hand.

Ensuring that our students are on the front edge of the new disciplines that will evolve means considering new technologies alongside traditional ones, understanding the changed relationship between the designer and society, and moving along a line between making things and making thought. From a Utopian point of view, we are here to help define and build a better world through the development of skilled, aware, creative minds and appropriate action.... [-]